Hello, feel free to address any of my contributions or emendations here.
Just a quick note--usually, on talk pages, add new entries to the bottom. It's less confusing for the recipient. Best, [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 17:40, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Done, thanks. Simonides 17:43, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Regarding those pages with the redirect. The standard is to place the article as the person's real name, with a redirect from the non-accented, so English users can find it. Burgundavia 05:19, Jun 19, 2004 (UTC)
- Hi, it was meant to be the other way round, please see the message I posted on your talk page. Simonides 05:20, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Re your remarks at History of literature, a WikiProject sounds good. Anything that will get that beast of an article fleshed out and beaten into shape. :-) I struggled with it for weeks, finally posted my additions in the hopes that it would inspire others to cover the fields I knew less well, and despaired when no one did. Ah well. :-) Once the literature project is up, I'll take a look at the page, and join, no doubt. :-) Medieval literature has been my baby for a long time, and I'd like History of literature to be at least as good. Thanks for leading the way on this! Jwrosenzweig 16:21, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Ah, finally, a response to all my requests on the lit and wikiproject threads! I looked at your article on Medvl. Lit., it's very good. Jwrosenzweig, I would like to assemble a large group of users to look into all the notable writers from all periods in every country; I have a huge list of writers with me that I was trying to make an "index" of, in the past couple of days, before I discovered that there already are such lists! But they are scattered, highly disorganized and very incomplete. So I would like help with sorting the data even before we create articles. The other major problem, I've discovered, is that there are Wikiprojects AND there are categories, and different people take care of these things, so it makes things additionally confusing. Another good reason to assemble everyone interested in literature in the Wikiproject and have them sort out the categories in a sensible manner. Hope to hear from you soon. -- Simonides 20:50, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
comment
Hi again, just noticed your comment on the Village Pump apropos of the situation over the Israeli-Palestine media article. To reiterate what others have said, administrators (of which I am one) have no particular authority for resolving conflicts; essentially we are just one voice among many (but we can intervene in conflicts in which we have not earlier been involved by protecting war-torn pages). If you find yourself in a conflict over an article, however obscure the topic, you needn't feel as though you are the only one defending it (a natural instinct; we have all been there). In such cases, drop a note on the Talk page of someone you consider sympathetic and ask them to take a look. Although the final decision is yours, the current thinking tends to frown upon making more than three reverts a day to a given article; if you get to that point, it is defintely time to call in others. Alternatively, you can request page protection on Wikipedia:Protected page. The version protected is not always the "right" one but that is just a temporary situation, and it is better than an extended edit war. It is good to see someone else interested in Middle East topics; you probably realize already it is a contentious area (no surprise), but just keep in mind that on Wikipedia the rational, objective point-of-view, insofar as its exists, eventually prevails over fanaticism in the end. All the best, -- 18:50, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Thank you for the heads up, Viajero! -- Simonides 20:50, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
If you have no objections, or some reasons why not, I would like to split the WikiProject Mass Market and Genre Fiction you added in two: WikiProject Mass Market and Wikiproject Genre Fiction, with both of them as direct descendants of WikiProject Books. I know from experience with science fiction that genre fiction can be a monster, even when the genre is not fantasy, where truly there be real monsters. Also I know that there is science fiction which is straight genre and mass market and other science fiction which is genre but not mass market, and still other like the works of Jules Verne or HG Wells which is canonical. Splitting the genre fiction from the mass market fiction makes regroupings easier afterwards.
Finally I would like to eliminate the intermediary WikiProject Miscellaneous Prose - Criticism, Letters, Memoirs etc., so that the two others you have placed as its descendants (WikiProject Fictional Series and WikiProject Critical Theory) become direct descendants of WikiProject Books. In a subject classification system like the Library of Congress classification there is some sense in making "miscellaneous" categories because they give more power to the cataloguing librarians charged with attributing them to books and after that to the reference librarians helping users find books. But Wikipedia does not have huge permanent staffs. We need something light, with as a flat a classification as possible.
For months now, right after having set up Wikiproject books along with others whose names you see there, I have been sifting though all the new articles every day, looking for book articles, placing basic bibliographical info (author and title are usually there and place of publication, editor and correct date are often missing and ISBN is missing more than half the time) and placing an entry for the book in List of books by title. I have also put all the pages of the list of books by title on my watchlist. I did this to get an idea of what kind of "movement" there was in book articles, and also to see how much work it would mean to use a very simple variation of the ISBD as the basics for a minimalist book template. It turns out that there are not that many book articles coming in: Barely 2 or 3 per day on average. It turns out also that just getting and placing minimalist bibliographical elements and then putting the relevant entries to the articles in the List of books by title takes a lot more time than I thought it would! AlainV 03:54, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Alain - you are welcome to rename the Mass Market/Genre Fiction project, but I prefer you make it one project rather than two. Doubtless some works among the latter are canonical, and there will be some overlap, but I just want to be able to distinguish between someone like H G Wells or Jules Verne (classic/canonical) and your average mass-market sci-fi; similarly there are erotic, even pornographic writers like de Sade, and then there is your usual soft porn title, or love stories vs. Mills & Boon - I think one category is more generous and would avoid future contention between what exactly is Mass Market, and what Genre, since the majority of titles that fit into one group will fit into the other. The Fictional Series is actually a descendant of the Mass Market/ Genre thing; not a descendant of Miscellaneous Prose (pleas see Catalogue. You see, I don't know whether they qualify more towads the Genre side or the Mass Market side, they would easily fall into both. As for Critical Theory, it is a descendant of Miscellaneous Prose; I have a reason for keeping Miscellaneous Prose - there are all kinds of classic works, such as Montaigne's Essays, which are neither fiction nor typical criticism or philosophy. Similarly there are many famous bodies of work - criticism, letters, memoirs, etc which are also famous literature but do not have anything in common except that they are "classic." Since a great deal of Critical Theory also refers to literature, I thought I would keep it under Miscellaneous Prose (it is also classified under Philosophy, and people are already working on it.) Please do not try to attach ISBNs to bibliographies - I am writing up my user page now and will explain why there. Thanks, and hope to hear from you soon! -- Simonides 04:11, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Philosophy
Please don't engage in big projects like refactoring and rearraging central Philosophy articles if you don't know what you are doing. Copy-pasting without even stating in the edit summary from where you are pasting is really destructive, and destroys attribution. As you yourself noted, the majority of the article content was relevant to the new title, and therefore the article should be moved, if at all. ✏ Sverdrup 09:32, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- 1) I know what I am doing, thank you very much. 2) I didn't state the move in the edit summary, but I did post a comment to the Talk page of the article, which you probably failed to notice. It was read by two of the editors who have been contributing to the article recently. They did not object to leaving the discussion where it was. They were both fine with the copy and paste. 3) I have already explained my Move feature doesn't work. If the attribution bothered you enough you could have posted a note on the Talk page, instead of reverting the article without understanding what you were doing. I suppose it is the lack of proper formatting that bothers you; I shall pay more attention in the future, but in the meanwhile I would recommend you try to discuss an issue before rushing into it and causing a confrontation. -- Simonides 09:56, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)